Race, Poverty, and U.S. Children’s Exposure to Neighborhood Incarceration

Abstract

Recent research has documented negative associations between children’s welfare and mobility and their exposure to neighborhood incarceration. But inequality in such exposure among children in the United States is poorly understood. This study links tract-level census data to administrative data on prison admissions to measure 37.8 million children’s exposure to neighborhood incarceration in 2008, by race/ethnicity and poverty status. The average poor Black or African American child lived in a neighborhood where 1 in 174 working-age adults was admitted to prison annually, more than twice the rate of neighborhood prison admission experienced by the average U.S. child. Residential segregation and the spatial concentration of incarceration combine to create significant ethnoracial and economic inequality in the neighborhood experiences of U.S. children.